FullStack 2016,London : Day 3

Second day of FullStack, 2016 London was full of knowledge, great workshops and more amazing people. It felt so good to meet people who have developed some awesome products that we have been using since long and provide an experience to our customers. I got a chance to talk with Heroku and twillio and they explained their future vision to expand and deliberate greate solutions.

Continuing on our journey, we entered the third day of FullStack 2016 which started with Forbes Lindesay’s keynote on “Data Fetching in React” . Forbes is an open source Javascript developer in Facebook and he explained how we can manage states and fetch data from a server in a React application, regardless of size of application. Forbes also guided the audience through some interesting tools to manage a React application.

After a break, we were looking forward to the session “Polymer Native – Native apps in JS” (partially inclined towards PolymerJS nowadays!), taken by Denis Radin from Liberty Global (UPC). Denis advocated and emphasized on the need of native programing rather than using wrapper libraries like React, which ultimately slows down the first interaction of HTML content on the browser. Polymer Native has strengthened the Polymer project by bridging the gap of creating native elements. He also explained the robustness of Polymer native beautifully as to how it can be used independently with any other JS framework or library . It was quite an amazing session and I, for one, am really looking forward to spend some time playing with it.

We all have been using Git since very long for managing source code and versioning. But we were thrilled to see how we can use Git as a database and play with data in a more user-friendly and faster way. Kirsten Hunter, in her session “Git as a database”, explained how git is a more powerful tool not only for managing source code but also to use it as a database. She also had some demos around some of the API and methods to play around with the data. Lots of people had queries about how Git can be used as database solution. After the session, I had a chance to have some 1-on-1 discussion with Kirsten about how it could be use as NoSQL database. Kirsten was super cool and very patiently resolved my queries. Cheers to her!

After grabbing lunch, we attended another keynot by Pete LePage on “Progressive Web Apps”. Progressive Web Apps which promise to be fast, robust, work offline, always up to date, able to re-engage users with push notifications, and more. He guided everyone through what the Progressive in Progressive Web Apps means, and how modern web capabilities makes these promises possible. Pete also emphasized that to embed these cutting edge technologies we also need to code these application in their way to get best results.

The last session of the day was aptly titled “The Things That I Like Are Superior To The Things That You Like ” taken by Mark Randle. Mark has 25 years of experience in web development and he is helping out people to grow their programing skills. This session was one of the funniest session that I have attended in my whole life. Mark proved himself to be always right in the choice of language, framework, coding guidelines, text editors etc. He explored in depth, the deficiencies in your character, education, social class and genes that have brought you to your wrong-headed state of existence that makes you chose wrong things all the time.

The most captivating thing about this conference was even at the third day we were not tired at all. It was an experience where we get to know what’s exactly going on in the world and learn lots many thing under one roof. Met people who are doing great work and motivates us well. Looking forward to being a part of it next year. Until then, keep experimenting and challenging yourself and you might end up as a speaker like me next year!

Komal is a senior software developer at TTN Digital based in India. She has been a part of fast-paced teams involved in delivering customised solutions around the world. She has considerable experience on NodeJS, AngularJS, Polymer, Java, Groovy, MongoDB etc